The Third Culture Intellectuals
John Brockman is a controversial name.
And that attention was considerably amplified when it became publicly known that his Edge Foundation was primarily funded by Jeffrey Epstein1.
Founded in 1996, the Edge Foundation is an outgrowth of the Reality Club. And ‘BuzzFeed News’ broke the news relating to the primary source of their income in 2019.
But that isn’t really the important bit. For now. No, what’s of interest is Brockman himself2. You see, in 1995, Brockman released rather the interesting book, titled ‘The Third Culture’. And yes - yes, it is.
His book is an effort to fill the gap, the third culture which CP Snow advertised for, albeit very progressively so, several decades prior.
Yes, yes, Wikipedia - I know. So here’s courtesy of the book itself3, which already on its sleeve explicitly drags in CP Snow - in addition to providing proof that this, indeed, was penned in 1995.
From the introduction -
‘In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book tided The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.‘
With the CP Snow link firmly established we move on to -
‘In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intel- lectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. Although I borrow Snow's phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.‘
So while CP Snow suggested educational reform, Brockman wants to go straight to the public, bypassing the existing hierarchy relating to the public dissemination of science. This is actually quite suspicious, and I will get to why soon enough.
‘Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines.‘
There are a number of very interesting fields mentioned here, and all in relatively little space. Even the Gaia Hypothesis.
‘The selection of scientists included in this book is, obviously, far from comprehensive. Many important contributors to the third culture, including social, behavioral, and anthropological scientists, are not here. In addition, the contributions of science journalists—many of whom are distinguished writers and notable thinkers—must also be recognized; their books have provided the public with a wider understanding and greater appreciation of the work and ideas identified with the third culture‘
While that might be, I successfully linked them with something… somewhat noteworthy. Something which caused my Twitter impressions to collapse almost immediately. If you didn’t notice, I’ll get to that soon enough.
‘Emerging out of the third culture is a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems—whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself—were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it, and it is the intellectuals with these new ideas and images—those scientists doing things and writing their own books—who drive our times.‘
And that right there should be a major hint. A major one.
First off, let’s just establish the list of scientists included in this book -
‘Who are the third-culture intellectuals? The list includes the individuals featured in this book, whose work and ideas give meaning to the term: the physicists Paul Davies, J. Doyne Farmer, Murray Gell-Mann, Alan Guth, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, and Lee Smolin; the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, Steve Jones, and George C. Williams; the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett; the biologists Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco J. Varela; the computer scientists W. Daniel Hillis, Christopher G. Langton, Marvin Minsky, and Roger Schank; the psychologists Nicholas Humphrey and Steven Pinker‘
It’s quite a long list, no? 23 names. What are the odds that all of these can be snapped to the same… structure, the same hierarchy, the same function? They’re long, no?
Alright, let me give you a hint. More on this in a minute.
It’s at this stage I could give you a long recitement of what they all were working on at the time in the mid-90s, but I can’t be bothered. Consequently, I asked ChatGPT4 to run through them on my behalf -
Oh silly me, my mistake, I asked it to intersect their individual work with General Systems Theory, or Systems Analysis - and the above is what came out.
What an extraordinary coincidence.
Next, I asked it to group the scientists by fields of specialisation, further requesting it to create the titles of said groups in the process. That led to 6 distinct groups.
I then asked it to hierarchically organise those 6 fields, fully expecting a pyramid shape. Much to my surprise, that’s not what it returned -
What ChatGPT returned was a single column, top to bottom. A one-dimensional array. And with Boulding fresh in mind, I then asked it to re-organise said scientists along the lines of the 9 hierarchical categories, outlined by Boulding’s 1956 paper. More specifically, I requsted it sort said scientists into the categories outlined in this hierarchy below -
And here’s what it returned. Within a minute of me posting this on Twitter, all impressions dropped to practically zero. Why?
Because every single scientist outlined by Brockman’s book fits into said hierarchy - without exception. Somehow, I don’t quite buy this being coincidental, or at least if so — why my impression plunge if it was?
For the record - I tweeted impression counts in replies, just to keep a record. Impressions came in absolutely ludicrously low.
So to establish how this fits into the timeline -
1956 - Kenneth Boulding releases paper titled ‘General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science’, in which he outlined 9 discrete levels of a theoretical system hierarchy, as well as outlining an alleged separation of the social and natural science fields.
1956 - CP Snow releases a wildly provocative article in the New Statesman, in effect calling social scientists ‘gay’, and further outlining the above divide in the natural and science fields.
1959 - CP Snow revises the above, and further includes a call for education reform which is then delivered in a Rede lecture titled ‘Two Cultures’.
1963 - CP Snow extends his 1959 paper, calling for a ‘Third Culture’, semi-apologises for public row, and finishes off the two final pages through inclusion of an almost hypnotic repetition of ‘applied science’.
1976 - Anatol Rapoport, co-founder of the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, gives lecture titled ‘General Systems Theory: A Bridge between Two Cultures‘, in effect outlining exactly where GST slots in.
1995 - John Brockman releases a book titled ‘The Third Culture’, chock full of references to CP Snow, and to which every contributor fits into the 9 hierarchical levels outlined by Boulding in 1956, who incidentally along with Rapoport also co-founded the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory. The book further promotes ‘taking science directly to the public’, in effect meaning ‘cutting out the middle-man’.
It’s at this point that I wish to make one thing absolutely clear. I am absolutely not accusing anyone of wrongdoing. The sheer complexity involved here is simply staggering, and I don’t believe that most of these scientists had ill intention.
The next question is… why was this book released in 1995? Well, I have a theory, but before we get there, we need to go through the IIASA first - which will be the topic of the next article.
And incidentally, this theory also explains why Epstein got involved.
This is great with tons of references to illustrate a third culture chronilogy